AN EPWORTH JEW.
NEARLY every northern-bound mail-train, since Bethany's arrival in
Chattanooga, had carried something home to Jack--a paper, a postal,
souvenirs from the battle-fields, or views of the mountain. Knowing how
eagerly he watched for the postman's visits, she never let a day pass
without a letter. Saturday morning she even missed part of the services
at the tent in order to write to him.
"I have just come back from Grant University," she wrote. "Cousin Frank
was so interested in the Jew who spoke at the sunrise meeting yesterday,
because he said a little Junior League girl had been the means of his
conversion, that he arranged for an interview with him. His name is
Lessing. Cousin Frank asked me to go with him to take the conversation
down in shorthand for the League. I haven't time now to give all the
details, but will tell them to you when I come home."
Bethany had been intensely interested in the man's story. They sat out
on one of the great porches of the university, with the mountains in
sight. They had drawn their chairs aside to a cool, shady corner, where
they would not be interrupted by the stream of people constantly passing
in and out.
"It is for the children you want my story," he said; "so they must know
of my childhood. It was passed in Baltimore. My father was the strictest
of orthodox Jews, and I was very faithfully trained in the observances
of the law. He taught me Hebrew, and required a rigid adherence to all
the customs of the synagogue."
Bethany rapidly transcribed his words, as he told many interesting
incidents of his early home life. He had come to Chattanooga for
business reasons, married, and opened a store in St. Elmo, at the foot
of Mount Lookout. He was very fond of children, and made friends with
all who came into the store. There was one little girl, a fair,
curly-haired child, who used to come oftener than the others. She grew
to love him dearly, and, in her baby fashion, often talked to him of
the Junior League, in which she was deeply interested.
Her distress when she discovered that he did not love Christ was
pitiful. She insisted so on his going to Church, that one morning he
finally consented, just to please her. The sermon worried him all day.
It had been announced that the evening service would be a continuation
of the same subject. He went at night, and was so impressed with the
truth of what he heard, that when the child came for him to go to
prayer-meeting with her the next week, he did not refuse.
Towards the close of the service the minister asked if any one present
wished to pray for friends. The child knelt down beside Mr. Lessing, and
to his great embarrassment began to pray for him. "O Lord, save Brother
Lessing!" was all she said, but she repeated it over and over with such
anxious earnestness, that it went straight to his heart.
He dropped on his knees beside her, and began praying for himself. It
was not long until he was on his feet again, joyfully confessing the
Christ he had been taught to despise. In the enthusiasm of this
new-found happiness he went home and tried to tell his wife of the
Messiah he had accepted, but she indignantly refused to listen. For
months she berated and ridiculed him. When she found that not only were
tears and arguments of no avail, but that he felt he must consecrate his
life to the ministry, she declared she would leave him. He sold the
store, and gave her all it brought; and she went back to her family in
Florida.
In order to prepare for the ministry he entered the university, working
outside of study hours at anything he could find to do. In the meantime
he had written to his parents, knowing how greatly they would be
distressed, yet hoping their great love would condone the offense.
His father's answer was cold and businesslike. He said that no disgrace
could have come to him that could have hurt him so deeply as the
infidelity of his trusted son. If he would renounce this false faith for
the true faith of his fathers, he would give him forty thousand dollars
outright, and also leave him a legacy of the same amount. But should he
refuse the offer, he should be to him as a stranger--the doors of both
his heart and his house should be forever barred against him.
His mother, with a woman's tact, sent the pictures of all the family,
whom he had not seen for several years. Their faces called up so many
happy memories of the past that they pleaded more eloquently than words.
It was a sweet, loving letter she wrote to her boy, reminding him of all
they had been to each other, and begging him for her sake to come back
to the old faith. But right at the last she wrote: "If you insist on
clinging to this false Christ, whom we have taught you to despise, the
heart of your father and of your mother must be closed against you, and
you must be thrust out from us forever with our curse upon you."
He knew it was the custom. He had been present once when the awful
anathema was hurled at a traitor to the faith, withdrawing every right
from the outlaw, living or dead. He knew that his grave would be dug in
the Jewish cemetery in Baltimore; that the rabbi would read the rites of
burial over his empty coffin, and that henceforth his only part in the
family life would be the blot of his disgraceful memory.
He spread the pictures and the letters on the desk before him. A cold
perspiration broke out on his forehead, as he realized the hopelessness
of the alternative offered him. One by one he took up the photographs of
his brothers and sisters, looked at them long and fondly, and laid them
aside; then his father's, with its strong, proud face. He put that away,
too.
At last he picked up his mother's picture. She looked straight out at
him, with such a world of loving tenderness in the smiling eyes, with
such trustful devotion, as if she knew he could not resist the appeal,
that he turned away his head. The trial seemed greater than he could
bear. He was trembling with the force of it. Then he looked again into
the dear, patient face, till his eyes grew too dim to see. It was the
same old mother who had nursed him, who had loved him, who had borne
with his waywardness and forgiven him always. He seemed to feel the soft
touch of her lips on his forehead as she bent over to give him a
goodnight kiss. All that she had ever done for him came rushing through
his memory so overwhelmingly that he broke down utterly, and began to
sob like a child. "O, I can't give her up," he groaned. "My dear old
mother! I can't grieve her so!"
All that morning he clung to her picture, sometimes walking the floor in
his agony, sometimes falling on his knees to pray. "God in heaven have
pity," he cried. "That a man should have to choose between his mother
and his Christ!" At last he rose, and, with one more long look at the
picture, laid it reverently away with shaking hands. He had surrendered
everything.
He did not tell all this to his sympathizing listeners. They could read
part of the pathos of that struggle in his face, part in the voice that
trembled occasionally, despite his strong effort to control it.
Frank Marion's thoughts went back to his own gentle mother in the old
homestead among the green hills of Kentucky. As he thought of the great
pillar of strength her unfaltering faith had been to him, of how from
boyhood it had upheld and comforted and encouraged him, of how much he
had always depended upon her love and her prayers, his sympathies were
stirred to their depths. He reached out and took Lessing's hand in his
strong grasp.
"God help you, brother!" he said, fervently.
Bethany turned her head aside, and looked away into the hazy distances.
She knew what it meant to feel the breaking of every tie that bound her
best beloved to her. She knew what it was to have only pictured faces to
look into, and lay away with the pain of passionate longing. The
question flashed into her mind, could she have made the voluntary
surrender that he had made? She put it from her with a throb of shame
that she was glad that she had not been so tested.
Some acquaintance of Mr. Marion, passing down the steps, recognized him,
and called back:
"What time does your speech come on the program, Frank? I understand you
are to hold forth to-day."
Mr. Marion hastily excused himself for a moment, to speak to his friend.
Bethany sat silent, thinking intently, while she drew unmeaning dots and
dashes over the cover of her note-book.
Mr. Lessing turned to her abruptly. "Did you ever speak to a Jew about
your Savior?" he asked, with such startling directness, that Bethany was
confused.
"No," she said, hesitatingly.
"Why?" he asked.
He was looking at her with a penetrating gaze that seemed to read her
thoughts.
"Really," she answered, "I have never considered the question. I am not
very well acquainted with any, for one reason; besides, I would have
felt that I was treading on forbidden grounds to speak to a Jew about
religion. They have always seemed to me to be so intrenched in their
beliefs, so proof against argument, that it would be both a useless and
thankless undertaking."
"They may seem invulnerable to arguments," he answered, "but nobody is
proof against a warm, personal interest. Ah, Miss Hallam, it seems a
terrible thing to me. The Church will make sacrifices, will cross the
seas, will overcome almost any obstacle to send the gospel to China or
to Africa, anywhere but to the Jews at their elbows. O, of course, I
know there are a few Hebrew missions, scattered here and there through
the large cities, and a few earnest souls are devoting their entire
energy to the work. But suppose every Christian in the country became an
evangel to the little community of Jews within the radius of his
influence. Suppose a practical, prayerful, individual effort were made
to show them Christ, with the same zeal you expend in sending 'the old
story' to the Hottentots. What would be the result? O, if I had waited
for a grown person to speak to me about it, I might have waited until
the day of my death. I was restless. I was dissatisfied. I felt that I
needed something more than my creed could give me. For what is Judaism
now? I read an answer not long ago: 'A religion of sacrifice, to which,
for eighteen centuries, no sacrifice has been possible; a religion of
the Passover and the Day of Atonement, on which, for well-nigh two
millenniums, no lamb has been slain and no atonement offered; a
sacerdotal religion, with only the shadow of a priesthood; a religion of
a temple which has no temple more; its altar is quenched, its ashes
scattered, no longer kindling any enthusiasm, nor kindled by any
hope.'[A] No man ever took me by the hand and told me about the peace I
have now. No man ever shared with me his hope, or pointed out the way
for me to find it. If it had not been for the blessed guiding influence
of a little child, my hungry heart might still be crying out
unsatisfied."
He went on to repeat several conversations he had had with men of his
own race, to show her how this indifference of Christians was reckoned
against them as a glaring inconsistency by the Jews. Almost as if some
one had spoken the words to her, she seemed to hear the condemnation, "I
was a hungered, and ye gave me no meat. I was thirsty, and ye gave me no
drink. I was a stranger, and ye took me not in. Inasmuch as ye did it
not to one of the least of these my brethren, ye did it not to me."
Strange as it may seem, Bethany's interpretation of that Scripture had
always been in a temporal sense. More than once, when a child, she had
watched her mother feed some poor beggar, with the virtuous feeling that
that condemnation could not apply to the Hallam family. But now
Lessing's impassioned appeal had awakened a different thought. Who so
hungered as those who, reaching out for bread, grasped either the stones
of a formal ritualism or the abandoned hope of prophecy unfulfilled? Who
such "strangers within the gates" of the nations as this race without a
country? From the brick-kilns of Pharaoh to the willows of Babylon, from
the Ghetto of Rome to the fagot-fires along the Rhine, from Spanish
cruelties to English extortions, they had been driven--exiles and
aliens. The New World had welcomed them. The New World had opened all
its avenues to them. Only from the door of Christian society had they
turned away, saying, "I was a stranger, and ye took me not in."
In the pause that followed, Bethany's heart went out in an earnest
prayer: "O God, in the great day of thy judgment, let not that
condemnation be mine. Only send me some opportunity, show me some way
whereby I may lead even one of the least among them to the world's
Redeemer!"
Mr. Marion came back from his interview, looking at his watch as he did
so. It was so near time for services to begin at the tent, that he did
not resume his seat.
"We may never meet again, Mr. Lessing," said Bethany, holding out her
hand as she bade him good-bye. "So I want to tell you before I go, what
an impression this conversation has made upon me. It has aroused an
earnest desire to be the means of carrying the hope that comforts me,
to some one among your people."
"You will succeed," he said, looking into her earnest upturned face.
Then he added softly, in Hebrew, the old benediction of an olden
day--"Peace be unto you."
All that day, after the sunrise meeting, David Herschel had been with
Major Herrick, going over the battle-fields, and listening to personal
reminiscences of desperate engagements. A monument was to be erected on
the spot where nearly all the major's men had fallen in one of the most
hotly-contested battles of the war. He had come down to help locate the
place.
"It's a very different reception they are giving us now," remarked the
major, as they drove through the city.
Epworth League colors were flying in all directions. Every street
gleamed with the white and red banners of the North, crossed with the
white and gold of the South.
"Chattanooga is entertaining her guests royally; people of every
denomination, and of no faith at all, are vying with each other to show
the kindliest hospitality. We are missing it by being at the hotel. I
told Mrs. Herrick and the girls I would meet them at the tent this
evening. Will you come, too?"
"No, thank you," replied David, "my curiosity was satisfied this
morning. I'll go on up to the inn. I have a letter to write."
The major laughed.
"It's a letter that has to be written every day, isn't it?" he said,
banteringly. "Well, I can sympathize with you, my boy. I was young
myself once. Conferences aren't to be taken into account at all when a
billet-doux needs answering."
The next day David kept Marta with him as much as possible. He could see
that she was becoming greatly interested, and catching much of Albert
Herrick's enthusiasm. The boy was a great League worker, and attended
every meeting.
David took Marta a long walk over the mountain paths. They sat on the
wide, vine-hung veranda of the inn, and read together. Then, as it was
their Sabbath, he took her up to his room, and read some of the ritual
of the day, trying to arouse in her some interest for the old customs of
their childhood.
To his great dismay, he found that she had drifted away from him. She
was not the yielding child she had been, whom he had been able to
influence with a word.
She showed a disposition to question and contend, that annoyed him. The
rabbi was right. She had been left too long among contaminating
influences.
It was with a feeling of relief that he woke Sunday morning to hear the
rain beating violently against the windows. He was glad on her account
that the storm would prevent them going down into the city. But toward
evening the sun came out, and Frances Herrick began to insist on going
down to the night service in the tent.
"It is the last one there will be!" she exclaimed. "I wouldn't miss it
for anything."
"Neither would I," responded Marta. "There is something so inspiring in
all that great chorus of voices."
When David found that his sister really intended to go, notwithstanding
his remonstrances, and that the family were waiting for her in the hall
below, he made no further protest, but surprised her by taking his hat,
and tucking her hand in his arm.
"Then I will go with you, little sister," he said. "I want to have as
much of your company as possible during my short visit."
Albert Herrick, who was waiting for her at the foot of the stairs,
divined David's purpose in keeping his sister so close. He lifted his
eyebrows slightly as he turned to take his mother's wraps, leaving
Frances to follow with the major.
The tent was crowded when they reached it. They succeeded with great
difficulty in obtaining several chairs in one of the aisles.
"Herschel and I will go back to the side," said Albert. "The audience
near the entrance is constantly shifting, and we can slip into the first
vacant seat; some will be sure to get tired and go out before long. They
always do."
It was the first time David had been in the tent, and he was amazed at
the enormous audience. He leaned against one of the side supports,
watching the people, still intent on crowding forward. Suddenly his look
of idle curiosity changed to one of lively interest. He recognized the
face of the Jew who had attracted him in the mountain meeting. Isaac
Lessing was in the stream of people pressing slowly towards him.
Nearer and nearer he came. The crowd at the door pushed harder. The
fresh impetus jostled them almost off their feet, and in the crush
Lessing was caught and held directly in front of David. Some magnetic
force in the eyes of each held the gaze of the other for a moment. Then
Lessing, recognizing the common bond of blood, smiled.
That ringing cry, "I am a converted Jew," had sounded in David's ears
ever since it first startled him. He felt confident that the man was
laboring under some strong delusion, and he wished that he might have an
opportunity to dispel it by skillful arguments, and win him back to the
old faith.
Seized by an impulse as sudden as it was irresistible, he laid his hand
on the stranger's arm.
"I want to speak with you," he said, hurriedly, and in a low tone. "Come
this way. I will not detain you long."
He drew him out of the press into one of the side aisles, and thence
towards the exit.
"Will you walk a few steps with me?" he asked; "I want to ask you
several questions."
Lessing complied quietly.
The sound of a cornet followed them with the pleading notes of an old
hymn. It was like the mighty voice of some archangel sounding a call to
prayer. Then the singing began. Song after song rolled out on the night
air across the common to a street where two men paced back and forth in
the darkness. They were arm in arm. David was listening to the same
story that Bethany and Frank Marion had heard the day before. He could
not help but be stirred by it. Lessing's voice was so earnest, his faith
was so sure. When he was through, David was utterly silenced. The
questions with which he had intended to probe this man's claims were
already answered.
"We might as well go back," he said at last. As they walked slowly
towards the tent, he said: "I can't understand you. I feel all the time
that you have been duped in some way; that you are under the spell of
some mysterious power that deludes you."
Just as they passed within the tent, the cornet sounded again, the
great congregation rose, and ten thousand voices went up as one:
"All hail the power of Jesus' name,
Let angels prostrate fall!"
The sight was a magnificent one; the sound like an ocean-beat of praise.
Lessing seized David's arm.
"That is the power!" he exclaimed. "Not only does it uplift all these
thousands you see here, but millions more, all over this globe. It is
nearly two thousand years since this Jesus was known among men. Could he
transform lives to-night, as mine has been transformed, if his power
were a delusion? What has brought them all these miles, if not this same
power? Look at the class of people who have been duped, as you call it."
He pointed to the platform. "Bishops, college presidents, editors, men
of marked ability and with world-wide reputation for worth and
scholarship."
At the close of the hymn some one moved over, and made room for David on
one of the benches. Lessing pushed farther to the front. David listened
to all that was said with a sort of pitying tolerance, until the sermon
began. The bishop's opening words caught his attention, and echoed in
his memory for months afterward.
"Paul knew Christ as he had studied him, and as he appeared to him when
he did not believe in him--when he despised him. Then he also knew
Christ after his surrender to him; after Christ had entered into his
life, and changed the character of his being; after new meanings of life
and destiny filled his horizon, after the Divine tenderness filled to
completeness his nature; then was he in possession of a knowledge of
Christ, of an experience of his presence and of his love that was a
benediction to him, and has through the centuries since that hour been a
blessing to men wherever the gospel has been preached.
"It is such a man speaking in this text. A man with a singularly strong
mind, well disciplined, with great will-power; a man with a great
ancestry; a man with as mighty a soul as ever tabernacled in flesh and
blood. He proclaimed everywhere that, if need be, he was ready to die
for the principles out of which had come to him a new life, and which
had brought to his heart experiences so rich and so overwhelming in
happiness, that he was led to do and undertake what he knew would lead
at the last to a martyr's death and crown. Why? Hear him: 'For the love
of Christ constraineth us.'"
There was a testimony service following the sermon. As David watched the
hundreds rising to declare their faith, he wondered why they should thus
voluntarily come forward as witnesses. Then the text seemed to repeat
itself in answer, "For the love of Christ constraineth us!"
He dreamed of Lessing and Paul all night. He was glad when the
conference was at an end; when the decorations were taken down from the
streets, and the last car-load of irrepressible enthusiasts went singing
out of the city.
Albert Herrick went to the seashore that week. David proposed taking
Marta home with him; but her objections were so heartily re-enforced by
the whole family that he quietly dropped the subject, and went back to
Rabbi Barthold alone.
FOOTNOTE:
[A] Archdeacon Farrar.